Tell Me When It Hurts (7 page)

He got up and walked over to the big freestanding globe. “Christ, Archer, you can’t possibly find more important work than what you’re doing now, here, for us. After two years you’ll have a fantastic start on financial security, at the age of twenty-three or -four. And you want to quit—have you lost all
reason
? What‘s the matter with you, girl?”

“
What happened to ‘It’s your choice; we’re not the Mafia’?” she asked coolly.

He gave the globe a spin. “Of course it’s your choice, Archer, but no one leaves. No one
wants
to leave,” Peter sounded uncharacteristically angry, dismissive.

“
Look, Peter, I finished the training—did the full year and then some. I gave a lot of thought to this, but this is someone else’s agenda, someone else’s decisions about what’s fair, who lives, who dies. And they may be well qualified to make those decisions, but I’m not in on them. I’m just doing someone else’s wet work, with no explanation. It’s not for me, Peter.”

Stopping the globe with his hand, he looked at her and said, “Bullshit, Archer. All you need to know is that someone else further up—someone imminently qualified—decided it was right for this country. That’s all you have to know. You’re a perfect candidate, and you’re throwing it all away.”

“
I’m going to law school. Columbia deferred me for only one year, and I’m taking them up on their acceptance. I start in two weeks.” Archer hesitated. “I’m . . . sorry, Peter. I hate being a disappointment to you.”

“
You’ll never be as happy as you would be working here. You know it and I know it,” Bennett said.

“
Getting your ego stroked and making good money isn’t the same as being happy.”

“
That‘s
not
what this is about, Archer. You think about this. And when you’re ready, you call me. Joke or not, you
are
special to me. You
are
my favorite intern. There will always be a place for you here. You will be our finest shooter. I
feel
it.”

“
Good-bye, Peter.”

Archer left Peter Bennett’s office without looking back.

* * *

Straight through law school, Archer received contacts regularly, urging her to reconsider. Some were subtle, some not so subtle. There were phone calls from Peter Bennett, casually asking how she was doing, and letters from a trainer in Syracuse, suggesting she visit them sometime. On the one year anniversary of leaving the program, she received flowers with a note saying only, “Miss you. —the Syracuse crowd.” Adam asked who the Syracuse crowd was.

“
Oh, a bunch of kids in Washington who went to Syracuse. I told you about them, remember?”

“
Oh, right,” he said, absently.

Once she had Annie, the calls and letters slowed to just a card on her birthday. The year of Annie’s death, Peter’s card just said, “Still waiting for you. Peter.”

Each time she opened one, Archer felt apprehensive. She would let it sit for a day or two, then sigh, slip her finger under the edge of the flap, and slide the card out to read the annual sentiment. What she disliked most was that she opened the cards at all and didn’t just throw them away. She liked hearing from Peter.

In truth, she had felt challenged by the work. She had enjoyed the camaraderie with the guys. She had liked being needed. What she didn’t like was death and almost death, and anxiety and fear. El Salvador had been one of those near-death experiences, she recalled with a shudder. At the time, U.S. support was on the fence, and either side, the
muchachos
or the military forces, would have killed Archer and her five colleagues if they’d been discovered crouching in a jungled ravine outside a small town.

Her six-man unit survived only because they had pushed out of the mountains forty, maybe fifty minutes before the military moved back in to kill anyone they missed the first time around. A helicopter picked them up with no time to spare.

Archer had been scared, no question about it. She would have killed if necessary—no question about that, either. She had felt hyperalert, quick, ready, but also dead-bang scared. And then in one of the villages, when she saw her first dead body up close, she’d felt sick and weak. It was a woman of about sixty, skirt hiked above her hips, legs splayed, shot mid abdomen, blood staining her thin cotton floral blouse. She still wore a little hat, just a slip of white lace bobby-pinned to her graying curls.

The hat got to her.
Poor soul,
Archer groaned silently,
poor soul.
She’d never get home again. Someone would wait and wait, then go looking, then find her, then scream, then dissolve. Archer couldn’t stop thinking about it. This was someone’s mother, or grandmother, or maybe sister, with her legs splayed in public. She would have been humiliated if she knew. Archer bent down and pushed the woman’s hair from her eyes, secured the bobby pins to the hat, and closed her eyelids. Then she pulled the skirt down over her knees, gently folded her legs together, and tucked them under her. At least when killing, you weren’t the victim. That was something.

“
Let’s go, Arch,” called Dobbs, grabbing her arm and pulling her up. “No time to waste—they’re getting way too close.”

Wiping away a tear, Archer bounced up and ran beside Dobbs as the shots from the government forces drew closer.

CHAPTER 7

Connor sat on a blanket in front of the fire at his camp. It was early evening; the sun was low in the sky but still warm and bright. By now he’d been in the Berkshires almost a week. He had originally driven out to see if the land left to him by his uncle George was marketable. It had some frontage out to the road, and its sale prospects were good. Now, however, after six days of walking every hill and swale of its three hundred acres, he found himself less and less inclined just to sell to the highest bidder.

It was a lovely piece of land: part meadowland, part wooded rolling hills, and wonderfully isolated. The only resident for miles was the reclusive lady who lived a short walk-away, through the woods, along an old logging trail.

Connor poked the fire. His original plan for the evening had been to cook the chicken he’d bought this morning in town. Just getting it had been a trek. He’d ridden Millie down to the clearing, a good mile from his camp, where the trailer and pickup were parked, some two hundred feet off the main road into Lenox.

Connor had tied Millie securely to the trailer, unhitched it from the truck, and started into town, a twenty-minute trip each way. But then he fretted that some random passerby might poke around Millie or even try to take her. So he had turned back, hitched the trailer back up to the truck, put her in the trailer, and taken her along. Now he’d committed himself to getting dinner for the hermit next door—an attractive woman, to be sure, but so grim it was wasted.

Connor sighed and poked the fire again. He had planned on staying here only long enough to get a break from Tara—that’s what he sometimes called his stark, dusty Wyoming ranch, in an ironic nod to his mother, Colleen, who hadn’t lived to see it. Its actual name was Three Chimneys Ranch. All the local ranchers guffawed at that one.

Hey, Connor, you took a real wrong turn, son. This isn’t Lexington, Kin-tucky
.
Just what do you think you’re raising there, thoroughbreds? Three Chimneys? What in hell does that even mean? Bad luck, that name . . .

The area spreads had names like Giant Bars Ranch, Twin Oaks, and Big Sky. Connor would just laugh. “The sheep don’t seem to mind,” he would say.

He knew the ranch was doing fine—Christ, it probably functioned better without him always double-checking everything and driving everyone else crazy. No need to rush back. Felix was a topnotch manager, and, for the past three years, the herd had grown at a good pace and cash flow had been robust, thank God.

Connor had always been afraid of being poor. His family had been solidly middle-class—his mother was a librarian at the Boston Public Library, his father a PE teacher at Milton Academy outside Boston—but it was middle-class basics only. There was never much in the bank for a “pamper,” as his mother put it. That was no longer true for him, yet here he was in the New England woods, living in a tent and trying to figure out if it was time to reinvent himself—again.

The tent living was no big deal. Connor and the hands often camped out for weeks at a time when tagging or moving a herd. On his arrival at the Massachusetts property, he’d made an arrangement with the motel two miles down the road. For the princely sum of sixty dollars a week, he had full use of a motel room between nine and ten thirty each morning. So far, it had worked fine for basic hygiene. The solitude, however, was trying. Sometimes he found himself longing for a beer and some good conversation with Jordan Hayes, his vet and best friend back in Wyoming.

He glanced at his watch. It was getting late; he’d better get moving if he was going to make dinner for his crabby neighbor. He wondered if she ever smiled or lightened up. He sighed, grabbed his lantern for the walk back, and headed for the logging path.

* * *

When Connor arrived at Archer’s front porch, the sky had turned navy blue, with fingers of pink reaching through it. He knocked on the door. “It’s Connor McCall.”

He heard movement inside, and the inner door opened. Archer leaned on a walking stick, but she looked alert. She peered out at him without opening the screen door.

Seeing him standing alone, she asked, “Where’s Alice?”

“
This is Alice,” he said, pointing down.

Archer looked down—though not too far down—at the black, bearlike creature standing next to Connor. The dog was wide and woolly, eyes hardly visible, and she lowered her head suspiciously, looking out through long ropes of hair at Archer as Archer studied her. Alice’s stump of a tail was not wagging.

“
God, what
is
that?” Archer asked.

“
Hey, don’t say it like that. She’s very sensitive. She’s a Bouvier des Flandres, a Belgian herding dog. She goes where I go; that’s a nonnegotiable.”

“
Fine by me,” Archer shrugged. “I generally prefer dogs to people. Hello, Alice. How are you this evening?” Archer pushed the screen door open and leaned forward to scratch behind Alice’s pointy ears. Her tail began to wag a little.

“
Yes, Alice, you are a lovely, big girl, aren’t you?” Archer crooned to the Bouvier, whose stump now wagged as if it had been switched on. Archer looked up at Connor. “Is she basically friendly?”

“
Depends what you mean by ‘friendly.’ If she takes to you, she can be. Just watch the sudden moves toward me. She views protecting me as her mission in life, and she’s been known to misinterpret things,” he said, as he and Alice stepped in.

“
Don’t worry, I’ll control myself.” And for just an instant, a smile played on the edge of her full mouth.

“
Good idea.”

Connor replenished the ice pack and then began assembling ingredients. After a sprint around the little cabin’s great room, the dogs settled down together on an old sofa near the front window. Archer pulled a rocker from the living room to the edge of the kitchen to watch Connor cook, and soon the scent of sizzling garlic and herbs filled the cabin.

A half hour later, he put on an Ella Fitzgerald CD and set the pine table with cutlery, candles, and napkins. He lit the candles and served dinner.

“
I see you’ve got gobs of linens and candles,” he said as he sat down at the table. “Do you use candles and cloth napkins when it’s just you?”

“
Yeah,” she admitted. “When I moved out here I got into the habit of making a nice meal most days. Gives my day a little focus.” She gave a sheepish shrug. “Soon I’ll graduate to setting a place at the table for Hadley, and from there it’s only a short step to getting a party hat for her and adopting seven cats, I suppose.”

Connor gave her a puzzled smile, not sure how much of this was self-effacing humor and how much cut to the truth of her life.

“
So, who are you actually, and what are you doing up here?” she asked, changing the subject and taking a bite of pasta.

He pulled out his wallet and handed her his driver’s license. Archer pulled her glasses from her shirt pocket and read aloud: “Connor McCall, Rural Route Twenty-two, Three Chimneys Ranch, Little Tempest, Wyoming.”

“
This is who I am, and I’m here ostensibly to decide whether to keep or sell the three hundred acres next to you. I planned to come here for a few weeks and turn around, but I’m liking it and may stay a few more weeks.”

“
Were you born in Wyoming, then?” Archer asked, handing back his license and taking her glasses off to lay them on the table.

“
God, no! Boston originally,” he replied, pivoting slightly in his chair to put the wallet back in his hip pocket.

“
How did you end up in Wyoming, then?”

“
Long story, but the short version is, I was a displaced businessman looking for a new beginning, and I’d always wanted to be a cowboy. I went out there seven years ago to start over. I have a two-thousand-acre ranch—small by Wyoming standards, but it’s big enough for my needs at the moment.”

“
Hmmm. And what exactly do you do on this little two-thousand-acre ranch?” asked Archer, stabbing a shrimp.